We invite third party collaboration and encourage creative use of the rbutr data in whatever way you wish. Feel free to contact us ( ) if you would like to collaborate and integrate rbutr with your platform/system/application/whatever.

How can this Database be used?

We have developed several prototype applications to demonstrate how these rebuttal connections may be used:

Submitting Rebuttals to the Database

The Chrome browser extension is currently the only method for users to add new rebuttals to the system. Making it possible to add rebuttals without using our Chrome extension is a priority for us. We are also eager to partner with organisations who wish to automatically submit quality rebuttals to the rbutr database.

The Philosophy of rbutr

The ultimate goal of rbutr is to improve critical thinking skills and foster a culture of critical thinking in all internet users.

The more immediate, but secondary goals of rbutr are to correct misinformation wherever it is found, reduce the spread of fake news, warn people away from hoaxes and scams, and expose people to arguments and ideas they wouldn’t normally encounter.

To achieve all of these goals rbutr is committed to providing a completely neutral platform which aims to collect all appropriate critiques, corrections and contradictions to any given webpage (or collection ofessentially-identical webpages), and work to organise those critiques amongst themselves so that the best are at the top of the list (live example).

rbutr makes no judgements on truth

rbutr gives no regard to whether the rebutted page(s) are true or not, nor whether the rebuttals are true or not. The only requirement is that the ‘rebuttal’ is critical or contrary to the ‘rebutted’ page. With enforcement of this simple rule we can be confident that factually incorrect webpages, hoaxes and scams will tend to be corrected, debunked and exposed, while ‘factually correct’ pages will also be critiqued, and complex issues may be explored in greater detail from multiple perspectives. In the end it is up to the audience to decide what they believe is true or not – as is unavoidably the case regardless.

We believe that our approach is not only ideal in a philosophical sense, but also ideal for technical implementation. It is incredibly simple, naturally resistant to gaming and it increases the impact of high quality critiques.

Our key hypothesis is that continual exposure to high quality critical analyses of all online content will foster a skeptical attitude towards information and improve critical thinking skills as a result of that exposure.

We firmly believe that a culture of critical thinking and a population trained in critical thinking is the key to solving the eternal problems of misinformation, propaganda, fake news and hoaxes.

2017 is the year we start fundraising and collaborating with educational institutions, publishing platforms, and fact checking organisations.

(Updated 7 March 2017)

Founders

Shane Greenup graduated from the University of NSW in 2005 with majors in Philosophy, Molecular biology (hons) and the History and Philosophy of Science. After graduation he developed a profitable niche website which allowed him to explore multiple entrepreneurial opportunities over the following years, giving him the experience and confidence to found rbutr at the beginning of 2012 with Craig.

Shane is an alumni of the Startup Chile (2012) and IndieBio (2016) accelerator programs, and is a Creative Innovation 2013 scholarship recipient.

Craig O'Shannessy has over 25 years of experience operating his own software engineering freelance business, which has given him an expertise in software analysis, design, project management and application development.

Contributors

Thomas "Tom" Lutzenberger is a full stack mid-level web developer from Bavaria, currently living in Switzerland. He loves open source projects and has a keen interest in all technology and the future.

Thomas is actively working on taking the rbutr browser extension Open Source, making the plugin give on-page rebuttal alerts in Facebook, Twitter, and Google, and implementing a range of other critical improvements.

Sindunuraga Rikarno Putra is currently completing his Master's Degree in Data Science. His main areas of focus are Machine Learning, Data Science, and Web Technologies. He is particularly concerned with the application of software technology on education and learning.

Sindu is developing a social media based rebuttal discovery tool which will be integrated into the rbutr browser extension and iFrame.

Joseph Thomas-Kerr is a skilled Software Engineer with 10 years experience, working primarily with Java, C#, C/C++ on projects in distributed server design, social networking.

Joe worked on the rbutr iFrame and Reddit reply bot.

Thomas Warner is currently studying Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan. Thomas helped develop, and currently maintains, the Reddit reply bot.

Harry Durgin is a successfully retired serial entrepreneur and hacker who joined our team mid 2013 as a full time volunteer developer. His specialties include hardware systems integration, UNIX, database management and interface design.

Harry ported rbutr over to Firefox to create our first Firefox browser extension.

Academic Research Team

Assistant Professor Nava Tintarev is a Technology Fellow in the Web Information Systems group of the Faculty of Engineering, at the Delft University of Technology. She studies how to best present and adapt the presentation of complex data (using both natural language generation, and visualizations) in artificial advice giving systems.

Nava is working with rbutr in a classroom setting, exploring how rbutr can be used to improve student outcomes and improve critical thinking skills.

Dr Adrian Holzer is a research associate and the deputy head of the REACT group at EPFL, where he mainly investigates Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) issues in educational and humanitarian contexts.

Adrian is working with us to help design and conduct experiments which will measure rbutr's ability to influence critical thinking and skepticality in Internet users.

Advisors and Advocates

Dr. Aubrey de Grey is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Research Foundation, the Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, and Author. He received his BA and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000 respectively. His original field was computer science, and he did research in the private sector for six years in the area of software verification before switching to biogerontology in the mid-1990s. (More on Wikipedia)

Tim Farley is a computer software engineer, writer and instructor with an expertise in computer security and reverse engineering. He is a Research Fellow of the James Randi Educational Foundation, the creator of the website What's The Harm?, and the owner of the SkepTools blog. (more on Wikipedia)

Tim was one of rbutrs first serious supporters and has written and talked about the value of rbutr as a tool for critical thinking online numerous times since rbutr was started.

I registered at school and the network proxy prevented me from downloading the browser extension. I can’t seem to find the download on the site without registering, which I can’t do because my email address is already in use. Could you please send a link to the extension or delete my account so I can re-register? Thanks!

Good point Mark. We do email the link to you when you register, so it should be somewhere in your inbox (or spam folder), but even so, we will add a link to your account page, so as long as you are logged in, if you click on “My Account” you should be able to find a link to download the extension somewhere on that page.
(we will add the link over the next day or two from the time this comment is posted!)

I registered on one computer and, now that I want to download the extension on another, I can’t. When I went to the home page there was a download link. It made me log in. Now that I’m logged in I cannot for the life of me find a download link anywhere. The images on this page are broken, so I can’t see the email address or whatever it is on the “Contact Us” image. The email I got reminding me about rbutr came from a “no-reply” addy, so this is the only way I can find to ask where I can download it.

I searched my mailboxes and didn’t see any other email messages from rbutr except for the “101” message.

Try going back to the homepage and refreshing. It is now set up so that if you are logged in, then the homepage ‘Download’ links actually download the plugin for you (rather than taking you to the registration page).

Also, if logged in, your “My Account” page should have a link to ‘Download Plugin’ clearly on it near the top.

Hi – interesting idea but I can’t get it to work. I’m expecting to see a button at the end of the rbutr popup that lets me ‘submit’ my matched page plus its rebuttal but no matter how far down I scroll it seems to be stuck beyond the bottom of the page. This might be a function of my notebook which has a small screen (trying to reduce the page size doesn’t work on the popup). I’ve also moved my taskbar to the left hand side of the screen to give me more room, but alas no joy.

Also, if there’s no rebuttal page available I’m not sure what button to press on my account page to create a bit of text that I can link to, which explains why the original page is misleading.

Hi Jo,
Yeah, unfortunately we had encountered this once before too. One notebooks with particularly small screens the popup page does literally hang off the bottom of the page. I will let you know when we fix this (and maybe get your feedback to make sure it is fixed!).

As for creating a bit of text to explain why the original page is misleading – this is not a function we have built, and at this stage, we’re not looking at doing that. If you want to write a rebuttal, then you will need your own blog, or other location to write it: Reddit is often used as a way to link to a page and then have a decent comment space with numerous discussion participants. So you could write a rebuttal in reddit, and then link that rebuttal to the original page.

Unable to edit / remove links from my profile. Using Chrome and tried firefox. Javascript removes them from page but doesn’t save. Refresh, brings them back. Also, no way of disabling notification or unsubscribing.

That isn’t good at all! I’ll get Craig to have a look at this as soon as we can. In our tests we are able to submit everything fine, though….we didn’t test the tutorial! And I just had a look, and you’re right, the tutorial isn’t letting me add the tags, which means you can’t submit! The good news, is that everything else will work fine still.

Sorry for the broken tutorial! This is what happens when you’re in Beta and Chrome changes the rules on you and rush out an update! 🙂